Descartes: His Life and Thought [Paperback]

Geneviéve Rodis-Lewis (Author), Jane Marie Todd (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 1999

Winner of the Grand Prix of the Acadmie Franaise for lifetime scholarly achievement, Genevive Rodis-Lewis is uniquely qualified to celebrate Ren Descartes. This major intellectual biography illuminates the personal and historical events of Descartes's life, from his birth and early years in France to his death in Sweden, his burial, and the fate of his remains.

Concerned not only with historical events but also with the development of Descartes's personality, Rodis-Lewis speculates on the effect childhood impressions may have had on his philosophy and scientific theories. She considers in detail his friendships, particularly with Isaac Beeckman and Marin Mersenne. Primarily on the basis of his private correspondence, Rodis-Lewis gives a thorough and balanced discussion of his personality. The Descartes she depicts is by turns generous and unforgiving, arrogant and open-minded, loyal in his friendship but eager for the isolation his work required.

Rodis-Lewis clarifies Descartes's school days, his family's circumstances and social status, the location of the famous "stove" where Descartes first discovered the foundations of his science, his military life, and the birth and death of his daughter. She is careful to point out the gaps that remain in the record of Descartes's life. Drawing on Descartes's writings and his public and private correspondence, she corrects the errors of earlier biographies and clarifies many obscure episodes in the philosopher's life.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This biography was published in France in 1995, the same year that another masterly study appeared in this country (Stephen Gaukroger's Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, LJ 4/1/95). There has been a resurgence of interest in this philosopher, and with good reason: Descartes is generally acknowledged as a pivotal figure in the transition from medieval to modern thinking about the world. This biography, written by a Frenchwoman (professor emerita at the Sorbonne) who has been immersed in Cartesian studies for decades, gives us a portrait of Descartes that perhaps only a compatriot could. The author is so familiar with her subject that she refers to him often as Ren?, and the story of his life and interests is rendered in as much intimate detail as can be derived from his extensive correspondence, which the author principally relies on to bring her subject to life. She shows him "warts and all," and Descartes emerges as a living presence rather than merely a historical figure. A good purchase for academic libraries, to complement the Gaukroger book.ALeon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This relatively compact biography of the seventeenth-century French philosopher is determined to reverse the slander of scandal in vogue among Descartes' recent biographers and to modify the view of his intellectual development. Rodis-Lewis bristles at the recently advanced image of Descartes as a famous libertine, taking pains to note, for example, that his affections for a particular male companion were entirely brotherly. Drawing frequently on Descartes' correspondence, Rodis-Lewis quarrels with previous accounts of his college training, and traces his early dismay with the Jesuit scholastic method and his movement through mathematics and on to metaphysics. She then focuses on the development of Descartes' philosophical method, which he hoped might be learned and practiced by everyday readers (to which end he wrote Discourse on Method in French, not the more elite Latin); on his difficult intellectual (and sometimes political) battles; and lastly on his study of passions, and his related sympathy for and efforts on behalf of some convicted criminals. She openly champions a newly respectable, if not altogether equable, Descartes, one driven by a search for truth. Jim O'Laughlin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (October 21, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801486270
• ISBN-13: 978-0801486272
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,101,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 stars almost unreadable, April 5, 2011

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chainlink (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Descartes: His Life and Thought (Paperback)

This isn't a bad book, exactly, just a nearly unreadable one--at least for a public prepared for a coherent general picture of Descartes. Its intended audience seems to be the small band of Descartes biographers over the centuries, whom the author takes to task, now one, now another, on this matter and that--on this interpretation of such and such a biographical artifact, or on that reading of a chronology implied by these letters or that diary entry. The book reads, in fact, less like a biography than a sort of catalogue raisonee of all the things still extant that bear Descartes' fingerprint.

There are, nevertheless, some interesting things that emerge from this constant professional cavilling. Despite the fact that Pascal is usually seen as in some sense the polar opposite of Descartes, at points in his philosophical apprenticeship Descartes appears to have experienced something very like Pascal's nuit de feu (an ecstatic, visionary experience that shaped his subsequent career in Christian apologetics). Descartes, too, it seems, carried around with him something like a sketchy account of a dream-experience that pointed out the path his life should take, namely that of subjection to a capital-T Truth. Odd that a career devoted to strictest rationality should have such an experience at its origins.

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A splendidly researched and vividly written biography., March 3, 2000

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Descartes: His Life and Thought (Paperback)

Genevieve Rodis-Lew is Professor Emerita at the Sorbonne and has written a splendid biography on the life and thought of a major and influential 17th Century European philosopher. Ably translated into English by Jane Marie Todd, Descartes is vividly presented in the context of his time. Drawing upon his own correspondence, Rodis-Lewis traces his disillusion with the Jesuit scholastic method and his attraction mathematics and then to metaphysics. Descartes emerges for the modern reader as a complete and complex man, so much more than a mere footnote in the history of science or the evolution of western philosophical traditions.